City of Belton Still on Track to Success after Rich History in Anderson County
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
As part of Anderson County’s bicentennial celebration, The Anderson Observer is offering brief histories of our towns and communities. Today we look at the history of Belton.
If you want to make Alison Darby smile, ask her about Belton. Few are as committed or as passionate about the place they call home.
Darby, a historian and board member of the Belton Area Museum Association, sat down with The Anderson Observer recently to provide an overview of the town’s history and why she thinks the city such a special place.
Belton began, in a sense, as a railroad’s compromise.
In 1847, planners laying out a rail route from Columbia to Greenville confronted the usual problems of the South Carolina backcountry including creeks, bridges, uneven ground, and the accumulating expense of crossing them. The route through Anderson Courthouse and Abbeville would have required too much engineering, so a more direct line along the Saluda River ridge, engineers concluded, could save $100,000, about $4 million in today’s dollars, a considerable sum in a place and era where every bridge seemed to carry the cost of a small fortune.
The decision worried Anderson investors, who understood that railroads were not simply transportation. They were commerce, migration, newspapers, mail, merchandise, opportunity, and the future arriving on schedule. If the main line bypassed Anderson, the city risked being left beyond the path of that future.
The solution was a spur line, running from the main railroad toward Anderson. And the place where travelers would change trains required a stop. That stop became Belton.
“Belton is actually a child of the railroad,” said Darby, in the interview which was part of the Observer’s coverage of Anderson County’s bicentennial celebration. By 1851, the rail line had reached Belton and two years later, it had continued to Greenville. The arrival brought a celebration, but it also brought the basic institutions of a town: a church, eventually the Presbyterian Church; a schoolhouse; lots for homes and businesses; and the Belton Breakfast House, where travelers could sleep and eat before continuing their journey.
The town took its name from John Belton O’Neall, the president of the Greenville and Columbia Railroad and a justice on the South Carolina Supreme Court. Darby said that Josephine Brown, daughter of Dr. G. W. Brown, who had sold land for the town, admired O’Neall and suggested a variation on his middle name. The result was Belton.
At first, the town was small, with perhaps 200 residents drawn from nearby settlements such as Craytonville, Golden Grove, and the Shady Grove area. Its early businesses were as practical as the landscape: a blacksmith to repair wagons and make implements, a hotel, dry-goods stores, and, inevitably, a few places where customers could obtain what the period politely called medicinal aid.
Agriculture supported the town, but the railroad made it viable. And cotton, Darby said, built it.
The farms surrounding Belton were often family operations of 200-300 acres, worked with the labor of relatives and sharecroppers. Farmers brought cotton into town, where merchants acted as brokers and the railroads carried the crop outward. Before the textile mills arrived, the Rice brothers established a cotton gin and oil mill. Then, in the late 19th century, the industrial version of Belton began to take shape.
Belton Mill was formed in 1899. By 1903, Darby said, it had become the largest cotton mill in South Carolina. Its location was unusual. Unlike earlier mill towns, it was not built beside a river to draw power directly from moving water since advances in the transmission of electricity in Anderson County meant that power could be carried the roughly six miles from the Saluda River to the mill. The town no longer had to sit beside the source of energy. The energy could come to it.
The population surged. From roughly 200 residents in the 1850s, Belton grew to more than 2,000 by the 1900 census. The mill economy produced not only jobs but a local hierarchy of investment, manufacturing, and philanthropy.
Belton Mill was locally owned. Rice Mills began with damask tablecloths, then diversified into terry cloth, pajamas, and other textile products. Blair Mills became known for a patent that allowed colored towels to be bleached, opening a market in luxury hotels that had previously relied mostly on white linens. Milliken later operated a plant in town, and Belton also had a shirt plant and conveyor-system manufacturing.
The town’s prosperity was not merely measured in payrolls. It also produced civic institutions. Factory owners and mill families invested in public amenities, including the art center, museum, and recreation programs that remain part of Belton’s communal life.
During World War I, Belton Mill shifted production to canvas ducking for tents, bandages, and military-related goods. Darby said the town embraced the war effort in a distinctly local fashion. The Belton Area Museum holds a Red Cross quilt signed by leading residents who each contributed a dollar. Women gathered at the hotel to knit items for soldiers abroad. For people unable to serve, mill work became another way to take part.
The Great Depression arrived with the familiar mix of anxiety and improvised endurance. Belton had three locally owned banks, and Darby said the town’s confidence in its bankers helped it avoid a bank failure or a run on deposits. Still, many residents kept money at home, including, she said, her own great-grandfather.
Then, in 1935, a tornado arrived and made an already difficult decade worse. It tore the second story off Blair Mills, blew out the windows at Belton Mill, and destroyed much of the Blair Mill Village. The disaster brought deaths and devastation, but it also revealed the town’s capacity for mutual aid.
Blair Mills had no insurance, Darby said, forcing the Rice family to rebuild at personal expense. The reconstructed mill-village houses were made of brick, not the more vulnerable materials that had been used before. One owner, she said, was so affected by the loss of workers that he insisted the replacement homes be built sturdily. The floor timbers, a relative who later renovated one of the houses observed, were not ordinary framing lumber but heavy beams.
World War II again brought industrial demand — and a social change that had once seemed unlikely. With many men away in military service, Belton Mill hired more African American workers inside the plant, paying wages comparable to those earned by white workers who had gone to war. Previously, many Black workers had been confined to outdoor jobs, including cotton-lint work. The pressures of wartime production altered some of those boundaries.
The mill era eventually receded with Belton Mill closed in the 1970s amid consolidation involving Abney Mills. Blair Mills lasted until about 2000, and Rice Mills continued into the mid-2000s. The loss of textile manufacturing was profound, but Belton did not disappear with it. Construction, automotive manufacturing, and newer industries helped sustain the town, while the legacy of the mill owners remained embedded in its institutions and neighborhoods.
Belton’s other great civic inheritance is tennis.
The town has been serious about the game since 1892, Darby said, when courts stood near the current depot. The South Carolina Tennis Hall of Fame is now in Belton, and the city’s public clay courts sit on land owned by First Baptist Church and leased in perpetuity. Anyone may play — with one traditional exception: the courts are closed from 11 a.m. to noon on Sundays, because church still has the right of way.
The Palmetto Championships, established in the 1950s, developed from Belton’s strong local tennis culture and became a qualifying tournament for larger regional and national competitions. The event once depended on families opening their homes to visiting players, while matches spilled onto backyard courts throughout town. Today, the competition extends to facilities in Belton, Anderson, and elsewhere, but the finals remain in Belton.
The town also has its renowned standpipe, the 1909 water tower whose crenellated top makes it resemble a small castle. It is one of only three surviving standpipes of its kind in South Carolina and the only one with its distinctive battlement-like crown. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it gave its name to the Belton Standpipe Heritage and Arts Festival, now nearing four decades as Anderson County’s longest-running fall festival.
Darby tells a story from the standpipe’s construction that captures something of Belton’s affection for its own myths. As workers built the tower, three teenage boys climbed its interior structure to look out from the top. One, Walter Cox, was challenged to race the others back down. His friends followed the spiral ramp used to roll wheelbarrows of concrete upward. Cox chose the scaffolding instead, lost his footing, and fell roughly 100 feet.
He survived — with a concussion, a broken leg, and other serious injuries — after being sent by trolley to Anderson Hospital. The bill, according to a letter in the museum’s collection, came to $38.
The old railroad depot, built in 1908, now houses the Belton Area Museum where Darby and other volunteers preserve the evidence of Belton’s successive lives: the railroad, the mills, the schools, the churches, the standpipe, tennis trophies, and relics from a train accident in which an engine fell into Broadway Creek, killing three people.
Belton was founded only about 30 years after Anderson Courthouse was established, and it has been part of Anderson County’s history for nearly all of the county’s two-century history. Darby describes the town today as a place that remains marked by hospitality, old institutions, and a civic loyalty that has outlasted the industries that made it rich.
For newcomers, she said, the attraction is partly practical. They can still find land. They are not packed tightly beside their neighbors. But the more enduring appeal, in her view, is the welcome: the feeling that a person can arrive from somewhere else and still become part of the town’s life.
Belton began as a stop created by a railroad detour but more than 170 years later, it remains a place where people pause, gather, compete, remember, and decide — again and again — to stay.
